Workspace and Design Analysis of Cable-Suspended Planar Parallel Robots

In this paper, we present a method to obtain the workspace of cable-suspended planar parallel robots. The significant difference between regular parallel robots and cable-suspended parallel robots is that the cables in cable-suspended robots can only carry tension forces. Hence, static equilibrium equations must be used to compute the forces in the cable robot. The workspace is characterized as the set of points where the reference point on the end-effector platform can reach with tensions in the cables. In this paper, we address this problem for robots with two, three, or more cables. Then, we study the question of design of the cable robot to determine the number of cables, location of the suspension points of the cables, and size of the moving platform to attain the largest workspace.